Conflict of Interest

What had changed it all had been her visitors last Friday night. A knock on the door at ten-thirty at night was unusual to begin with, but still more unexpected was the discovery, on opening the door, of Judith Laing and her young man, Christopher. As she showed them in, she’d recalled her telephone conversation with Judith a few weeks ago, when she’d said she was investigating a child-labour story. Was the visit in connection with that, she wondered, or was it purely social? After sitting down, Judith had confirmed that Ellen was to be the keynote speaker at the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony in two days’ time. Then she and Christopher told their story.

Ellen had, of course, been shaken to the core by their revelations. But there was no time for disbelief. Quite apart from her remembering Judith as a student with a particularly acute intelligence, the two had brought evidence – including photographs of Starwear’s slave factory in Jaipur. Christopher had told her about the modus operandi of Mike Cullen and Elliott North – the deaths, in suspicious circumstances, of William van Aardt, Merlin de Vere, Kate Taylor; the dirty-tricks campaign against Starwear competitors; and how he suspected GlobeWatch was merely a front set up by Starwear to give itself prizes.

Recovering from her shock, Ellen Kennedy didn’t know what made her more furious – the horrific abuse to which Starwear was subjecting children in India, or the fact that she’d almost been deceived into giving the company her full endorsement. Almost – but not quite. She had been tempted to phone Claude Bonning, then and there, and have it out with him. But Judith and Christopher had persuaded her otherwise. They had proposed a very different tack indeed, and one which, she conceded, would have far more impact.

The three of them had talked into the early hours before Judith and Christopher left – they were staying at a friend’s cottage in the Cotswolds. Next morning, Ellen had started making a few discreet enquiries, using the list of GlobeWatch sponsors Claude Bonning had originally sent her. One advantage of having been a lecturer for the past forty years was that generations of students had passed through her hands. Some, like Judith, had stayed in touch, and had gone on to scale the dizziest of corporate pinnacles. By now, Ellen knew a fair number of senior executives at various companies, including some on the GlobeWatch sponsor list. She managed to track down a few at their homes during the weekend. She was sorry to trouble them, she explained, but she hoped they could answer a quick query, or give her the name of someone who could; was it the case that their company had made a substantial donation to a non-profit-making group called GlobeWatch?

A couple had known the answer straight away. Others phoned her back. In three out of five cases, there had been no record of any donation, although amounts below £250, one of her former students explained, were not individually listed. In the remaining two cases, a donation had been confirmed. In each case, the company had made a donation of £100 on the recommendation of their PR advisers, Lombard.

It was all the proof she’d needed. But she still wanted confirmation from Claude himself. Making her way now into the hotel, she found him resplendent in his penguin suit, greeting more movers and shakers than she had ever seen in one place.

‘Claude, I need a quiet word,’ she had told him, unsmiling.

‘What – now?’ He’d appeared startled.

‘Yes.’

She seemed very serious, he couldn’t help noticing, which was strange. She didn’t seem the type to suffer from nerves.

‘Well, I …’ He glanced about the crowded room rather helplessly, before remembering the security room just off the lobby. Swiftly leading her to it, he showed her inside, before closing the door behind them.

‘In the past few days,’ she began immediately, ‘I’ve been on the telephone to five of my former students now working for companies who supposedly sponsor GlobeWatch.’

Her emphasis had him suddenly, and visibly, crumpling.

‘It turns out that none of the companies has paid more than £250. In fact, it’s more like £100 each. And unless I’m very much mistaken, GlobeWatch has only one corporate sponsor. The same company that’s in line to win four prizes tonight, including the Company of the Year Award. Is that the case?’

Claude was, by now, white-faced, his jaw trembling. There was no need for him to answer.

Stepping closer to him, she looked despairingly into his eyes. ‘Claude – why?’

Raising his hands to cover his face, he shrank before her, until he finally managed to gasp, ‘I was blackmailed.’

‘Elliott North?’ She was brisk.

He glanced up at her, astonished.

‘Huh!’ she snorted. ‘As I thought.’ Then she was making her way across the room.

Behind her, he called out, plaintively, ‘You’ll still be … making your speech?’

At the door she turned. ‘Oh, yes, Claude,’ she told him, ‘you can be sure of it.’

The motorbike courier pulling into The Herald’s Wapping offices winced as he swung off the bike and made his painful way across to Security. He’d been on the bike for the past three hours, racing up the M4 from the Cotswolds, ignoring the developing cramp in his legs. Speed was of the essence, the young lady had said. And he had promised her he’d get the envelope delivered before seven. Looking at his watch now, he noted with satisfaction that it was just ten to. He raised the visor of his helmet, looking at the woman inside Security.

‘Delivery for—’ he squinted at the envelope, ‘Carol Anderson.’ Within a minute, Carol had come down to collect the envelope. PA to the Editor of The Herald, she rarely received envelopes addressed to her personally. Tearing it open on her way back to the office, she read Judith’s handwritten note, glanced over the accompanying piece – and gasped. She began running towards the Editor’s office.

Judith and Chris walked hand-in-hand down the cobbled pavement from the pub where they’d just eaten dinner. Bernie’s Cotswold bolt-hole was conveniently located just a few hundred yards away from one of the most congenial hostelries in the shire – one with which the two of them had grown rapidly acquainted in the past two days.

Following their visit to Ellen Kennedy in Oxford, they’d arrived around three o’clock on the Saturday morning. Neither of them having slept properly for over forty-eight hours, they’d collapsed in Bernie’s

double bed and slept solidly ’til mid-afternoon. They had phoned Ellen again, and she had told them of her investigations confirming GlobeWatch’s true status as a mere front for Starwear – and about the speech she’d planned for the following night. Then the two of them had set off for a pub dinner.

It had been an evening of red wine and candlelight, reminiscences about their times together at Oxford, and an outpouring of their lives since then. There had been such intimacy, such emotion. It was as though the barriers holding them apart for so long had, after all the events of the past few days, been tossed aside, unleashing an intensity of feeling neither of them had felt since they were last together. On their way home, on that crisp, November night, they had paused outside a chapel where Christmas carols were being practiced; they were both transported back to the first time they’d been together, after carols at St John’s. Drawing Judith close to him, Chris put his arms around her and kissed her. Raising her face to his, Judith responded to his passion, their bodies melting together.

What happened when they returned to the cottage was as inevitable as it was utterly ecstatic. High on good feeling, the moment they stepped inside the door they hadn’t been able to wait to tear off each other’s clothes. Leaving a trail of coats and jeans and underwear all the way from the front door to the sitting room, they’d knelt down in their nakedness before the glowing embers of the fire, lost to each other as they kissed. Then, drawing back, with his forefinger Chris traced the smoothness of her cheek, pale beneath her dark, tousled hair, down her neck, all the way to where her pert, beige-tipped breasts were taut beneath his touch.

‘I just want you so much.’ His voice was husky.